A Northampton Liberal Transplanted in CT

Monthly Archives: November 2006

Congrats to Beth Bye, our local heroine! We’re sending her to Hartford — well, I suppose it’s not that far. She ran a strong campaign and deserves her win.

Of course I’m sad about the Lamont loss. I think Lieberman is becoming a bit of an insidious character, and I’d hoped that Connecticutians would see that.

Finally, things are looking decent for the Dems in general. Perhaps we have a good shot in 2008!

So last night Sujal was holding a Lamont sign outside of a polling place, and then he needed to phone in the results to the Lamont headquarters. Since he needed to use my cell phone, I was at the polling place for a bit, too. We got to see the election officals opening the polling machines — something I’d never seen before. They are the lever kind of polling machines — not my favorites. (I like — I guess they are optical scan — the kind where you draw a black marker line connecting an arrow.) They opened the back of the machine and read out the totals. What was funny to me was that they had this flashlight, and there are rolls of paper at the top for write-ins. They had to check for the write ins by looking on the scrolls. There were none, but I remembered writing in some of my friends’ names years ago when I was voting for an election that I had no idea about — I think I voted for Madeleine Reber for Judge, Dale Hudson for Auditor, etc. It made me realize some poor dude had to read that. He or she probably wondered — now who the hell is Madelene Reber?!

It was very cool to see the democratic process in action. We were invited to the Lamont party, but I was so tired, I just couldn’t go. It makes me want to be an election official next year.